Alessandra Pioselli

Mounted in Grazia Varisco’s hometown of Milan, “Ne ho solo 80” (I’m Only 80) is a worthy homage to this pioneer of kinetic art, who was born in 1937. Covering more than fifty years of her research into space and time, it begins with works from her “Tavola magnetica” (Magnetic Table) series, 1959–62, formed of mobile geometric elements attached to magnets that viewers can move over a metal surface. Engaging in this apparently simple game leads to a probing of categorical opposites, such as order and disorder, closed and open. A childlike playfulness encourages us to reconsider seemingly elementary

Anita Leisz’s work by turns evokes a visual unity and highlights the nature of its construction from disparate elements. One piece, composed of two galvanized-iron cylinders (all works Untitled and 2017), is the only on view that clearly brings to mind a three-dimensional structure. The other six works are simultaneously paintings and sculptures. Hung from the walls, they possess a mutable-seeming depth that complicates their status as paintings, even though their presentation encourages categorization as such. One wood, gypsum, and fiberboard piece, for example, is five inches thick. Another

José Parlá’s personal grand tour of Italy extended north to south through seven citiesMilan, Bologna, Rome, Naples, Matera, Bari, and Leccewhose urban plans reveal profound differences in land, politics, and culture. The route was echoed in the artist’s ten new canvases on view here. Fragments of walls, which Parlá found and picked up along his travels, and other materials were superimposed in complex and harmonious abstract compositions.

In these works, the artist has a dual viewpoint. From a distance, the viewer could grasp the totality of the painting and the formal play among its

Adrian Paci’s exhibition “The People Are Missing” was orchestrated on two different registers: Immersive installations were constructed alongside a selection of photographs and videos of found materials. Four works presented a narrative that unfolded in four stages, one after another, in the gallery’s four rooms. One space had been transformed into a shower (Untitled, 2017). Water fell violently onto the floor and was immediately sucked into a drain hole. An old gas heater emitted a sinister noise. If a domestic bathroom is a private and reassuring place for tending to one’s body, this environment,

Along the gallery’s walls Andrea Sala has installed reproductions of simple hand-operated tools at the height of a work surface in pieces titled Maglio (Mallet), Tasso (Stake), Rotaia (Rail), Suola (Sole), Tacco (Heel), and Tappo (Stopper) (all works 2017). Sala has previously examined the forms of objects in the context of the modernist traditions of design and architecture. Now, he turns his eye to the workshop: to the world of implements with essential forms. The function of these tools is no longer obvious thanks to the decontextualizing effect of Sala’s process (he creates the works with

Sphere of Influence, 2017, installed in the gallery’s first room, perfectly captured the themes broached by this exhibition. The work is a photographic print of a fertilized egg, taken from a scientific publication, in which the artist has intervened with cotton threads as if the photo were a canvas. The threads surround and outline the image, then, soft and light, cascade outside the frame. If one did not know what the picture was of, the enlarged egg might seem like a distant and mysterious planetary system, made up of celestial bodies growing within one another. Sphere of Influence hints at

Conceived specifically for the spaces of the gallery, this show presents new works by Karla Black made primarily of cotton wool. Orchestrated as variations on a theme, these soft, sensual, and delicate abstract works first hide, then quietly reveal, a complexity of form and meaning. The artist establishes a long-distance dialogue of sorts with the tradition of abstract painting, investigating two-dimensionality but dismantling the canvas’s optical space in favor of physical, tactile work that ideally can be appreciated from more than one side. For example, In Place of Requirements (all works

“Benglis and the Baroque,” Lynda Benglis’s first solo show in Italy, highlights the artist’s long-standing interest in the period in question. The sinuousness of seventeenth-century sculpture, along with the Baroque enthusiasm for artifice, is reflected in the American artist’s magmatic forms. In this exhibition, she continues to address themes of the knot and the torso, interpreting the topos of the male bust without limbs. As such, in Torso, 2016, a piece comprising five torsos created for this show, Benglis reprises the sculpture of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Here, for the first time, Benglis has

This show—which focuses on Giulio Turcato’s “Superfici lunari” (Lunar Surfaces) and “Tranquillanti” (Tranquilizers), two series emblematic of his 1960s production—reveals the nuances in a body of surprisingly poetic work that alternates between pure abstraction and Art Informel. The nine pieces on view from “Superfici lunari,” dating from 1965 to 1970, suggest an imaginary spatial realm while reinforcing the physicality of their “canvases.” Turcato painted in oil and mixed media on foam rubber, and thanks to these materials, his surfaces are never flat but appear rich in variations, signs,

There is no clear purpose in hand-drawing ornamental motifs, yet in her I quaderni di Adriano (Hadrian’s Notebooks), 2016, Sabrina Mezzaqui has exhaustively reproduced the decorative scheme of a mosaic floor. Turning the pages of the twenty graph-paper notebooks that comprise the work, arranged in rows of four by five, viewers encountered varying motifs from mosaics in the Roman emperor Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli, an elegant repertory of arabesque, geometric, and floral elements. Ornamentationan organizational expression of a human predilection for beautiful formconveys configurations

The artist duo Alis/Filliol have always interrogated the meaning of making sculpture, dragging the medium beyond its confines and thinking of it as a magmatic form in transformation, the result of repeated manipulations. Their latest installation, Ultraterra, 2016, features wallpaper that covers two large walls of the gallery; it depicts a landscape made up of solids and voids, thickenings and cavities, like a grotto.

The wallpaper began with a plaster cast of a head that was filled with polyurethane until it burst. The artists then cast this exploded head, now made up of two shells, and the

Marion Baruch’s current exhibition focuses on an ongoing project that the artist began in 2012, for which she makes use of the scraps of mangled fabric that remain after pieces have been cut out by garment makers. She restores and displays these fragments, reading the presence of images and meanings (which are suggested by the works’ titles) into the now useless material’s gaps and edges. The fifteen works on view, made over the past three years, create a visual score in the gallery, with rhythmic relationships between solids and voids, geometric figures and graphic signs. Many remnants are

For his first solo show in Milan, Swedish-Argentinean artist Runo Lagomarsino continued his reflection on the ways in which historyespecially histories of migration and colonialismis inextricably entwined with depictions of space. At the gallery entrance was a blue-and-white enamel welcome sign that read as a warning: DEPORTATION REGIME. The plaque (Deportation Regime, 2015) was elegantly retro, its aesthetic contradicting its harsh message.

The installation that gave the show its title, West Is Everywhere You Look, 2016, comprises nine maps that hung, furled, from the ceiling at

Almerino is a gentleman who raises birds. Feeding and caring for them, he spends days marked by repeated gestures. He uses scrap materials to construct perches, piece by piece, in the courtyard of his house—an environment organized according to animal life. Emma Ciceri has created a series of photographs capturing this place and has then deleted swaths of her images with an eraser, leaving behind only the aforementioned original structures (Untitled, 2016). She also shot two videos, Almerino vola (Almerino Flies), 2015, and Nenia (Dirge), 2015, in two very different expressive registers. The

The thread connecting the fifteen works (all 2015) in Graham Wilson’s recent exhibition “I Clocked Out when I Punched In” seemed to be timespecifically, time as it plays out in the valuation of artistic production. Wilson’s self-reflexive exhibition presented cheeky meditations on the status of his own work, in terms of both its cultural and economic capital. Some pieces are quite literal: Institutionalized suggests that the time spent producing a work can be systematically monetized, and that the artist might be conceived as an office worker. A broken vintage punch clock was installed on

After years of photographing modernist domestic architecture, Luisa Lambri has turned her lens to works by artists of the same era, from Donald Judd and Lucio Fontana to Lygia Clark. She shoots her new subjects from the same perspective with which she has long approached her vivisection of architecture, treating the artworks as if they were places. It is no accident that she has chosen to interpret the efforts of artists who have likewise built their practices around investigations of space and architecture, artists who revel in the counterpoint between solid and void, the dialectic between

Cory Arcangel’s site-specific installation Photoshop CS: 1060 by 2744 Centimeters, 10 DPC, RGB, Square Pixels, Default Gradient “Spectrum,” Mousedown y=1800 x=6800, Mouseup y=8800 x=20180, 2015, is a wave that disseminates the full spectrum of Photoshop’s color gradient by way of a two-hundred-square-meter carpet designed by the artist for a room in this twelfth-century palazzo. This is the first time the artist has placed work in a historical context, therefore the reflection on the obsolescence of technologies, which his Pop investigations usually involve, here acquires a tone of meditative

Amalia Del Ponte’s latest exhibition presents visitors with a sensory experience of ineffable and barely perceptible signs, sounds, and passages of light and shadows. This is the first time the artist has exhibited the installation Ars Memoriae (The Art of Memory), 2014: twenty-one India-ink drawings of animal tails, which look as fleeting as ghosts, bodies that can be intuited but not seen. The animals are presented in alphabetical order.

At the center of the installation, the artist has constructed La ruota della memoria (The Wheel of Memory), 2014, in which visitors can turn two overlapping

The sea is an entity that separates and conjoins geographies and histories, where unpredictable routes are traced. In Zineb Sedira’s current exhibition, “Maritime Chronicles,” which presents her recent work, she examines the ocean as an omnipresent dimension.

Sedira created the photographic series “Ship on Sand,” 2014, and the diptych series “Comings and Goings,” 2014, in a cemetery of abandoned ships in Nouadhibou, Mauritania. In these works, the artist captures anchors that hang from the rusty sides of ship, sinking into the sand. By metonymy, they speak of the ocean and voyages, but also of

A common concern with the relationship between space and time imperceptibly unites the works that David Lamelas presented in this exhibition. Time as Activity, first created in Düsseldorf in 1969, gives the sense of a filmic machine in progress, one conceived as a staging of time. There have, in fact, been ten versions of the work created so far; the two in this exhibition, Time as Activity (Naples) and Time as Activity (Milan), both 2013–14, follow the format the artist established in Düsseldorf. They are video installations showing a series of urban scenesseven in the case of Naples,